Description

GÁBOR BÁNÁT, ABROAD GABRIEL BANAT, BORN GÁBOR HIRSCH (TIMISOARA, SEPTEMBER 23, 1926 – BEGUR, SPAIN, JULY 23, 2016)

 

 

 

 

Son of Sándor Hirsch. He began playing the violin at the age of six, and a year later he was already performing in public. He was nine years old when he was heard by Béla Bartók, who stopped in Banat’s hometown while traveling to Romania with his regular sonata partner, Edath Zathureczky. As a result, the boy became a student of Zathureczky and Kodály at the Budapest Academy of Music. Despite anti-Semitic laws in Hungary, he performed several times as a soloist in symphony orchestras as a student of the academy. In April 1941, the OMIKE Art ActionHe was the performer of Beethoven’s evening. In 1942 he won the Hubay Prize. From the autumn of 1943, he had the opportunity to perform only in the OMIKE Art Action and at events of various Israeli institutions. He graduated at the age of seventeen after secretly playing his graduation program in a darkened room in front of a faculty jury. In 1944, together with his parents, he fled to Southern Bačka for a few months, where they survived the Holocaust with fake papers and only returned to Timisoara after the Soviet invasion. After World War II, George Enescu took his patronage and gave several joint concerts in Bucharest. In June 1946, he gave a concert at the Timisoara Synagogue, for which Miksa Drexler Chief Rabbi thanked. He soon left Romania and went to Budapest for a short time, from where he traveled to the Geneva International Music Competition in September this year. He continued his career in America, where he first worked as a violinist with Nathan Milstein and then toured the United States, Western Europe and Japan. He was a soloist with the greatest orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, which he joined in 1970 and remained a member of the orchestra for 23 years. He has performed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Residentie Orchestra in The Hague and many other musical ensembles. He has compiled a six-volume collection of violinist-composers from the 17th and 18th centuries, entitled Masters of the Violin. He discovered the original descriptions of Mozart’s five violin competitions and edited a facsimile publication called The Mozart Violin Concerti so that violinists could finally see Mozart’s original strokes. He wrote the biography of the composer and violinist Chevalier de Saint-Georges, “Black Mozart.” His articles have appeared in The Strad , Allegro Magazine , and the Black Music Research Journal. He has taught at Smith College and Hart Music College, and has given lectures at New York Universityand headed the violin department at the Westchester Conservatory of Music, where he also conducted the orchestra. His wife, Diana Stevenson Banat, and his children Catherine Banat and Peter Banat.

 

 

TRACKLIST

 

 

Robert Hall Lewis – Tocatta For Solo Violin And Percussion

Composers Recordings Inc. (CRI) – CRI SD 263

LP, Album

US

1970

Classical

Contemporary

B1 Robert Hall Lewis – Tocatta For Solo Violin And Percussion

Percussion – Walter Rosenberger

Timpani, Percussion – Saul Goodman

Violin – Gabriel Banat

 

Penderecki – A Portrait

VOX (6) – STGBY 673

Candide Series

LP

UK

1974

Classical

Contemporary

A2 Miniatury For Violin And Piano

Piano – Ilana Vered

Violin – Gabriel Banat

 

Ilhan Mimaroglu – Musiques Noires

Finnadar Records – 90104-1

LP

US

1983

Electronic

Concrete Music, Experimental

B2 Music Plus One

Violin – Gabriel Banat

Studio – Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

Distributor – Atlantic Recording Corporation